We added rich text to free response questions:

Hopefully this makes free response questions more conducive to some science and math questions!

We added notifications on the teacher and student side. For now, the only notifications you'll get are when our system detects that a student has perhaps inacurrately self-assessed themselves on a free response question. Eventually, we plan on adding more notifications on other useful events (e.g. when several students are underperforming on a question); please let us know if there's one that you'd be interested in having.

When you get that notification, you'll get the opportunity to either keep the student rating or to override it with your rating:

If you choose to override it and mark it as incorrect, then your student will get a notification about it:

After you're done with the notification, you can archive it:

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a restful and refreshing break.

Just a quick reminder that over the winter break, we added the ability for teachers to "freeze" their students' personal decks so that the count would not keep incrementing.

This is just a friendly reminder to unfreeze it by going to your settings page and updating the "Freeze Personal Deck" section:

Some quick minor updates!

You can now name your personal deck assignments something other than "Personal Deck Assignment". As part of this change, we added a new column to the assignment tables so that you can easily identify what kind of assignment it is from that view:

We also changed the student name format in tables to be [Last Name, First Name] since some teachers mentioned that's the alphabetical sorting that they are more used to.

Hi y'all! First of all, sorry we haven't been posting here as often. We will be better about announcing all of our updates moving forward!

Secondly, we wanted to share about the new "Personal Deck" tab in the classes view. This tab gives you data on how your students are doing on their personal decks.

There's 2 views, one that tells you how students are doing over time (one important note is that we started gathering personal deck data over time on December 8th, so that's when you should see the first data point):

And the other tells you more details on how students did on a specific day:

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know!

We've heard from some teachers who want to use the student's Personal Deck for Do Nows/Warm Ups that sometimes if a student has too many cards due in the Personal Deck, then studying the Personal Deck becomes a discouraging experience. 

To help address this issue, we added a field for you to configure the max number of questions that can be due for each student on a "Personal Deck Assignment":

If you don't want a limit, and you want for all of the questions that are due in the student's Personal Deck to be pulled into the assignment, then leave the field blank.

We added the ability to see how many late assignments each of your student has:

If you click on the number, then you can see specifically which late assignments they have not turned in:

You can now deactivate questions from your all of your students' personal decks:

By default, all questions are active in a personal deck.

To go back and deactivate older questions from the personal deck, go to the "Edit Questions" area of an assignment, and then navigate to the "Existing" questions tab. Each card has an indicator of whether it is "active" or "inactive". Once you open the question, you can then deactivate that question.

This past week we worked on increasing the speed of our app and added a couple of new features.

Note: Please refresh your browser if you are unable to see these updates.

For the speed increase, we removed one of the key bottlenecks and increased the speed of Podsie by about 2x.

We also added the following new features:

1. You can now adjust due dates even after students have started working on assignments and after the assignment is past due.

2. Math and science teachers, you can now add subscripts and superscripts to multiple choice answers. To do this, type out the multiple choice answer choice text, and then highlight the characters that you want to turn into a superscript or subscript:

3. If a student misses a short answer or multiple choice question, then the deeper learning will automatically be opened for them.

4. You can now use an existing question as a template for a new question. To do this, open the Question Preview while putting together an assignment and click the Copy button:

In addition, you can also choose to "Keep Question Content" when creating a new question, and that would allow for the question you just created to still be there as a template for your next question:

If you have any questions or thoughts, please don't hesitate to email, slack, or submit feedback on this google form.

Today, we updated how standard masteries are calculated. Previously, any time a student answers a question, we update the mastery data for the standards the question is tied to. Standard masteries were inflated because

• Podsie requires students to answer a question correctly once before moving on, so the last answer is always correct 
• We use a decaying average formula where the most recent response is weighted most heavily

To address this, we did the following

We updated the formula formula to weigh the most recent response a bit less.
Previously, the formula used was

old mastery * 0.35 + new assessment * 0.65 = new mastery

Now, the new formula is 

old mastery * 0.5 + new assessment * 0.5 = new mastery

In the future, we plan on implementing features that allow teachers to customize how they want to calculate mastery score.

Only the student's first attempt for a question on an assignment or personal deck session will count towards their mastery store. Any subsequent requests will not count.
We've updated our FAQ (https://www.podsie.org/faq) to include an example on how we calculate mastery.